How do I work iteratively when building a hardware product?

Description

Cyril Ebersweiler, Founder and Managing Director at HAX explains the iteration process when building a hardware product.

Video Transcript

How do I work iteratively when building a hardware product?

Working iteratively in hardware requires to have a decent understanding of what is the end of the process. Meaning that you’re going to have to ship something at some point to someone. There is definitely, the carton box versions of things that you start doing on the prototyping side but there is a phase that happens very quickly, which we call prototization.

This is the moment where you’ve more or less identified the market, the product features and you’re going to try to confront that to reality, because if you design in a vacuum, you’re going to end up with a bill of material that is way too expensive, that would cost you hundreds of dollars and there’s no market for it. Or you’re going to create that little beautiful aluminium brush thing that you wanted to until you discover that you actually need to mold which costs 1,0000 dollars to actually do that.

It’s fun to dream a bit, but for startups with limited resources, you usually get real very quickly and fancy later, once you actually have understood the process and built for it. One of the trick that most startups falls through is that the iteration lasts until the very end of the manufacturing process, meaning that on the assembly line every day you are actually changing your product.